


Deception, or, Bear Necessities

by Bloodnok



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Animal Transformation, Body Horror, Gen, Were-Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 18:34:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10314407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bloodnok/pseuds/Bloodnok
Summary: In which Percy gets bitten by a were-bear, his avoidance strategy works as well as it always does and Trinket is there to help.





	

Deception comes less easily to him of late. He supposes it is their fault - they came to Whitestone, drew out the far from savoury aspects of his past and destroyed them. Even Orthax. Even Ripley. He has, unexpectedly, fallen into the habit of honesty. With Vex, especially, but with everyone, even Cassandra. Still it galls him to think that he is now struggling to keep things from _Trinket_.

It has been sometime since… well, anyway, he’s noticed Trinket watching him in quiet moments. It’s not like when Vex has Trinket watch him - there’s a sharpness to Trinket then, a quality that is all Vex-through-Trinket, the times when he’s fullest of her influence. This is softer, more sorrowful, Trinket’s big brown eyes settling on him with a heaviness, a ...concern. It reminds him of Keyleth, of Pike, of the gazes avoided through those dreary Whitestone days before the ziggurat. Last time, he was giving off black smoke and blowing people to oblivion. This time he’s managed to keep most disturbances internal. The lack of bloodlust has been a relief, though there have been other urges.

He feels his muscles shifting beneath his skin. At times it is as though he’s being torn in a dozen directions at once. His ears want to rise, his nose to drop and elongate- his face in general is full of new tics. Percy isn’t sure if they are outwardly apparent - the tiny twitches could be utterly unremarkable to any observer. For him they are _torture_. Not quite itches, not quite muscle spasms, they combine the worst parts of each to make a whole that plagues him without relief. Once or twice brings a hand up to worry at the affected area. Easier around his eyes, when he can pretend to adjust his glasses and brush against the strangely convulsing skin. He daren’t do so often of course. That would be obvious.

His hands and feet he merely finds disarming. At odd moments he’ll look at them and think _wrong_. What he expects to find in their place he hesitates to name, the formless feeling in his gut merely rumbling that they should be different somehow - shorter while also bigger, with less movement in the thumbs and long, sharp nails… He bundles this in with the slouching, the stooped position he’s had to adopt to accommodate the feeling that he should be on all fours. He’s not yet had to pretend - pathetically - to have dropped something on the floor, but the notion worries him. Apart from the indignity the idea is so, so _foolish_ that it is utterly unbefitting of both the man he was and the man he longs to be.

Percy notices his strength almost immediately - there are plenty of heavy tools in his workshop and while he’s never struggled to lift them, as Vax or Vex might, his expertise is in delicacy, in refinement. Large pieces make him pause, require a measured, planned approach. After the Incident, they might as well be made of silk, for all the trouble they give him. He could decide he prefers the anvil in the other corner and absentmindedly lift it with one hand - that, was the first thing he tried, in fact, having acquired a different taste in organisation in his time away. This, he imagines, is how Grog must feel. It is undoubtedly supernatural - the increase in strength comes on within days but his muscles are slow to reflect the change, still growing increasing weeks later. It alone doesn’t give him pause but with the other things...

After a day or two, Trinket is clearly escalating his campaign; he begins to brush against Percy when they walk together, he rests his head on Percy’s leg at meals, something he hasn’t done since he learned that Percy, unlike Vax, would respect Vex’s decisions about Trinket-appropriate food. Vex, though she notices, makes no comment. Percy wonders if she will ask Trinket about it and worries a little about what the bear will say. The fretting pushes him into retreat; he hides in his workshop and bolts the door against prying paws. He maintains appearances well enough that no-one seems concerned. The desire to get to all the projects he put aside for the dragons is a decently Percy excuse.

This lasts the better part of the month. The urges, unspoken, unnamed, grow with each passing day. He finds himself waking at night and failing to get back to sleep, feeling the moonlight breaking through curtains as though it is cool white fire, sinking into him like mercury. It blazes into his mind and burns away all the soft shadows of slumber - when he shifts to get the light off him, he finds it the merest sliver through the chink in the curtains, not even casting direct light on his skin. Gradually, he shifts so that he is working more nocturnally. 

The first part of his evenings belongs to Vex, of course, and he will always lie down with her after and make an attempt - increasingly half-hearted - to rest. When frustration drives him to the edge he will slip away to his workshop. What progress he makes in the small hours is lost, of course, when the sunrise returns his ability to sleep. He hopes Vex doesn’t feel he avoids sleeping with her - he would happily lie in her arms or with her in his, letting the hours slip away. He fears to wake her, however, so he slinks away. If she notices, she says nothing - perhaps she is indulging his fantasy of being enigmatic, perhaps Trinket’s ever-presence at the workshop door comes with her sanction...

Perhaps he has remembered enough of lying to get by - though he has never really been able to fool Vex, only frustrate her questioning. Perhaps it is the unfamiliar essence of this affliction that confounds Pike and Keyleth. Perhaps it is merely that he has managed to control it for now, to thrust deep into the small of his back, into the hollow in his spine where Orthax dwelt for so long - perhaps it _is_ that. There is already a space for it, this new part of him, there is already a heavy door in his mind behind which things can live, secret even from himself. There is still a clinging smoke in that recess - as there is everywhere - but the beast is part of him now too, so it doesn’t choke on it as it should. He is half-sunk in darkness, swallowed by slowly curling smoke. And now the moonlight strikes him and this new entity rises to engulf him.

The huff against the lock is easy to ignore, as are the whines - at first. Then Trinket growls, a long guttural complaint that Percy half-imagines he can understand. He sighs, puts aside his tools and opens the door. Trinket barrels in, half in his cannonball form and Percy is relieved to think he caved when he did - why Vex would care about Trinket breaking open Whitestone’s unreinforced doors he cannot imagine, but he shudders to think how she would feel if Trinket had been hurt.

He closes the door behind them and bolts it again. Trinket had straightened, is sitting with his back against one wall, tucked neatly into the space between workbench and piles of supplies. Percy smiles, in spite of himself. Trinket has always been a very well-behaved bear and in workshops that means a Tidy Bear.

Percy has been on the knife edge before and has the purest idea of his own self-control - so he delays. He sets aside one project and selects another, what remains of his rational mind making sure his workspace looks frantic, looks just as it would at the end of a full night of tinkering. Finally, when the last shreds of composure are failing, he tells himself he is satisfied.

‘Well,’ he says, running nervous fingers through his hair and coming to sit, cross-legged on the floor opposite Trinket. ‘You’ve found me out, old chap.’ Trinket gives him a Confused Bear look but continues to sit up, his eyes turned attentively to Percy. ‘I did something unwise, which is not out of character, and I now have…’ Words quite abruptly fail him. He whines in frustration and Trinket echoes the noise exactly. ‘A Problem.’

He has timed it Too Well; with those last words he collapses. His compartmentalised little mind brings a dozen things to his attention at once. His need has been building for days and is now actively painful as it rolls through him in waves. This transformation _hurts._

Head - he has never suffered at the hands of Grog pulling his jaw apart but it must feel something like this, with horrible, audible groaning as his bones grind against each other, the plates of his skull shifting, growing, shrinking. His skin follows a second behind, so it is stretched agonisingly taught in places and hangs unpleasantly loose in others.

Hands - more of the same, only there is also the matter of his fingernails, which grow with a vengeance, not painful, but tortuous in their own way - a nagging sensation of _wrong_ that would make him shiver and seek relief if there weren’t so many other things to distract him. It’s a bit like the sensation of new, sharper teeth growing in, only that brings an ache with it too.

Everywhere - tiny pricklings on his skin as thousands of thousands of hair follicles burst from beneath the skin. The sharp pains are followed by an uncomfortable itching as they grow - too fast, too fast - yet _another_ agony. He knows them all, thanks to Ripley, knows torture when it is pain and torture when it isn’t and this is all of them, unfeelingly cruel as nature can be. He is so _hot_ above all of this, his body boiling beneath his skin - it alone should be enough to make him lose consciousness, a sweet cool relief that his mind knows is inevitable. Percy waits for it, patient and then not-so as the sensations build and build - he could never pay attention to them all at once so he waits, letting each wash over in turn before a particularly sharp nastiness draws his mind. He must be overwhelmed soon, it must be coming nearer, surely _now_ he’s about to faint.

Pressure builds and pain builds and heat builds - and breaks. He is shoved out the other side a new creature. Not Percy, although he smells and thinks like Percy. Smells. Just like Percy, this stranger gets stuck on that thought. They are familiar, comforting - there is black powder, chemical agents, metal. Workshop. Behind those smells there’s … Whitestone. Some people might claim that rock cannot smell but not-Percy has Percy’s mind and he recognises the dry, cool stone as he would anywhere. Home. He clutches at the smell like a blanket. Unchanged by the human traffic of the castle, it smells like childhood and he drinks it in, pushing recent memory into a distant corner. It is easy to pretend that nothing has changed like this.

Except, the third smell… Familiar, though less welcome, it comes to him in a image of warm tavern fires and pouring rain. The steam rising from a large form curled by the hearth - Bear. He smells Dry Bear and is glad, at least, that his new, sharp nostrils are spared the full glory of Wet Bear.

‘Trinket?’ Percy - he has decided to think of himself as still-Percy for now, though he’s unsure - moans the question hazily and it comes out as a growl, his new mouth barely forming it into human sounds. Trinket lumbers over, knocking a stool aside in his haste. He licks a reassuring stripe across Percy’s too-long muzzle.

‘You smell different,’ Trinket says as he sits in a whuff of dust next to Percy. ‘More bear.’ Percy nods and sighs. He was afraid of that. Now that Trinket is here, Percy can smell two bears. One smells like Trinket should, if his dull human nose recalls it correctly; one smells like Percy.

Trinket grunt-huffs. ‘It’s good.’ He rests his head on his folded paws and looks up at Percy. ‘You are stronger now. Claws and teeth are better for protecting Vex than the Smoke and the Noise.’ Percy looks down at his hands - they are horrible mockeries of what bear paws might be if they tried being human; white-furred mitts with long, clumsy fingers that end in wicked claws. His thumbs twitch - no opposition - and he curls them into a clumsy fist. They are far too awkward to work his guns. He sighs again -even that is bigger now, loud and obvious. Trinket nuzzles into him, reassuring. It tickles where the white fur of his chest gives way to surprisingly human skin across the abdomen.

‘Don’t worry. I will teach you to be a Good Bear. Vex will be proud of you then.’ Trinket slumps down and curls his body as much as he can around Percy. It is harder now - his limbs are longer, somehow and they bulge with muscle. Percy doesn’t protest about the strangeness of learning anything from Trinket - _Trinket_ \- or about the idea that he wants Vex to be proud of him, least of all for being a Good Bear. He doesn’t put one clumsy paw up to fuss at his face, to see what parts are human and what parts are bear; if the rest of his body is any guide, the answer is too much the latter and too little the former. He doesn’t even worry about what will happen when Vex comes to find him the next morning. Instead he slides down onto Trinket and gives way to exhaustion.

**Author's Note:**

> I would be remiss not to mention alienfirst, whose delight in monsters and werewolf!Percy played no small part in inspiring this. I'm sorry it's bears not wolves, but I like the Monster Manual's stuff about the Neutral Good were-bears and also I like Percy and Trinket hanging out.
> 
> Please let me know if you feel the rating or tagging for this work is too soft. I am a little partial to vivid descriptions of body horror and I don't wish to distress those who don't share my enthusiasm for it.


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